Visual Fonts / Infoji

Getting ready to launch, I'm rather confused about sales tax. It seems like Stripe Tax, for example, would *calculate* taxes for you, but at the end of the day it's you who's filing with n jurisdictions. How does everyone else does taxes for digital goods?

While we will build an API/app, and eventually work directly with Stripe/Revin on our own, I feel that we simply need to get products in real people's hands. We looked at Gumroad, Shopify, WooCommerce etc, and settled at ConvertKit Commerce for an integrated email, landing page, and sales experience. Look forward to this showing up in the real-world in 2 weeks or so!

We work to make most maps accessible to most people under the most conditions. "Most people" means continued efforts to support mulitilingual usage. There are two sides to multilingual support: input (typed) language, and output (map) language. There are different technical challenges in each, and we have successfully casted a traditional Chinese set of map-in-fonts. Next is to think about input.

With level-of-details working OK, we expanded the system to Oceans & Seas. Map preparation is, by now, routine if time-consuming. The Countries base, together with the Seas expansion, will form the free Play edition of the font. Playing with the Oceans & Seas expansion elevates the urgency of the postgres-backed Elixir web-app. While countries have well-recognised abbreviations (e.g., ISO, web, phone code), marine environments don't, and their naming is less standard. For example, "Sea of Japan" is the "East Sea", but the East Sea can refer to a number of locations.

Different apps render font-embedded SVGs with different limits. We previously introduced level-of-details rendering, to preserve details for smaller locations, while large countries still stays within limits. That turned out to be insufficient, and we added one more LoD and brought not only the *number* of features, but also the *quality* of feature under control. The easiest thing to see this effect is the Parana river running along Argentina. Let's hope this makes it work across all macOS/Adobe apps!

https://vimeo.com/753311471 To prepare for the meeting with a copywriter, I made an unpolished video explaining the project. Look forward to replacing this placeholder video with something legit!

We completed a collection of maps with two related enhancements. These new maps are zoom-aware, showing different level of details and labels. Looks awesome. However, the larger files bump up against what different applications would render; since we work with the least common factor (surprisingly this was with Adobe font rendering) we'll need to do more selective trimming.